re: Teach a man to Fish (Fark Board Beginner Questions)

quote:

---

Is gimp sufficient?

---

It all depends on how you are going to use it. It is not Photoshop. However, it is as close as you can get without software investment. If you are interested in vectors, try Inkscape. It is not Illustrator but again, great for the price.

If I were to give someone advice, it would be to start on free software and practice, practice, practice. You learn from doing. If you are going to make a living at digital art or you find a deal on software, like a student discount, it might be time to upgrade to Photoshop. If you purchase a graphic tablet, many of those come with software like Coral painter.

GIMP should be good enough for most people's purposes. I enter a shirt design contest some weeks in which the winner gets paid. Most of those artists put my work to shame. And quite a few of those professional artist use GIMP.

What's the best file format for signature images? I'm making another one for myself but the file size, even when using .png, is way too big and it's only 300x75. I need to lose about 100kb.. Should I just be sparing with layers or is there a file type that can accommodate this?

PS isn't giving me a whole lot of file type options, I looked for .gif but it's not in the format dropbox.

quote:

---

.gif is what you want (it should fit the parameters). Convert it yourself (a number of ways...perhaps even "Save as--> *.gif (name it yourself)), or just post it here and I (or someone) will take care of it for you.

---

Thanks Doc. I'm downloading a converter now.

quote:

---

Which program are you using to create in? If not by default, there should be an available plug-in for .gif support.

---

I'm creating in Photoshop CS5. The converter I found keeps crashing..



There's the image.. I'll look for a P.S. plugin

Eta
This is a different one that is 400x100.. I rather this size.

The copy of cs5 I have isn't legal, so maybe it was left out in the rip and I'd be better off using gimp..

eta again:
Yeah, downloaded Gimp, opened the .psd and saved as .gif, bam under 30 kb.. Tried to make it my sig, guess I gotta wait for approval from admins?

GIMP IS HARD. frick me this is frustrating.

GIMP can be difficult. I have downloaded it several times and got frustrated and quit. It also crashed on me during a project.

Every time I went back to Paint.net. Like I have said before, it is more intuitive especially if you have used Microsoft Paint. If something specific is throwing you, ask and someone can steer you in the right direction.

quote:

---

I hope it shows up.

---

It does. However the file size is too large. PNG's aren't generally good for sigs. You will lose resolution with a JPEG but the file size is much smaller. And since the size of a sig is small anyway, a little resolution loss shouldn't cause an issue.

Great thread.

Seen some discussions here about capturing video images, particularly from sites like YouTube. Suggestions have been sites such as benderconverter or GifSoup.

I've tried those in the past, and while they're good, I tend to just use screen capturing software, particularly SnagIt since it's very easy to use and has a lot of functions. We use it at work as well, and it's a great product.

There's free trialware, but it's such a good product, like WinZip, I just bought it. Well worth the $50 or so it costs.

Wondering if other people use other similar products, or what they've found best to capture (and edit) videos for creating .gifs.

Regards,

Nole Man

quote:

---

Nole Man

---

I used CamStudio a couple of times for non-YouTube stuff. It did the job...but I wasn't impressed. I will have to give SnagIt a spin.

I would like some thoughts from the experts on here. I made myself a new sig and I cut out a player for the first time. I think it did a pretty good job cutting out Mathieu, but I wanted to see what you guys thought. Here it is: